


(Locked) Door

by OrphanText



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ambiguity, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Childhood, Gen, Mind Palace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-10
Updated: 2012-06-10
Packaged: 2017-11-07 10:58:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrphanText/pseuds/OrphanText
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written based on a word prompt 'door' that I gave myself. The Mind Palace needed no keys, but there is one locked door, deep within. Sherlock doesn't forget, but he doesn't remember it, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(Locked) Door

**Author's Note:**

> Taking a break from an awful week. BTSAT is being difficult right now, and I'm pretty much frustrated about school. Prompts are fun, but its self given. Awh. :'C

  Sherlock had a mind palace, and that was nothing new. It was where he filed away information, stored facts, put aside stories, histories. Equations, definitions, results of experiments. They were all shoved into the palace haphazardly, occasionally swept behind doors if Sherlock was ever bored enough to clean it up. He already knew where each bit of information lay, exactly where it was stored, so cleaning was really a pointless exercise, if only for a mental aesthetic reason, just to see a minute or two pass by before he was down to a burning frustration of boredom again.   
  
  What was the point, if he was the only one who ever visited, anyway?   
  
  He prided himself on the vastness of it, on the incomprehensible quality that the mind palace was and posed to others. It was three-dimensional, and then not. It was a palace, and then a file, and then merely numbers, changing and blinking and never staying still. It was everything, and nothing. Changeable, flexible,  _alive_ . A new surprise, or not-surprise each time Sherlock visited it. Ivory, ebony, crimson and in an instance, the color of John's horrible jumper. Glass ceilings, concrete ceilings, there was no bottom line, no model to model it after, but Sherlock knew its map, inside and out. Sometimes, he would take a walk down its corridors, stepping through the chaos and the mess plastered against the walls and scattered over the floor, just for the sake of doing it. This was the world, as lived by Sherlock Holmes, seen through his eyes, catalogued, documented, experienced, all put away in his mind, here to exist until the day he stops breathing. Of course, it wasn't perfect, no. There were always some information that he was missing, some that he had thrown away and discarded, and some that he had not bothered to put away at all. One day, he promised himself, one day, he might, although the idea of storing mundane and useless information did not appeal to him. This was his mind, his palace, his own personal library, not a public International Archive for anyone else's perusal. Just for him, his own. No one else's.   
  
  If John ever saw it, he mused, the man would definitely insist on some serious cleaning up, and possibly give up about two days in. His lips quirked up into a smile. John wouldn't know it, but he had a room dedicated to his flatmate, reluctant to have John's information lying littered and tangled with the other much less unimportant things. He even kept it clean. Well, remotely clean, but it was the thought that counts.   
  
  Layers upon layers, in a maze of a hundred corridors and a thousand rooms, with a face that changes every day, Sherlock was keenly aware that there was one room that never changed. It never moved, never shifted, never did anything. It remained locked, at all times, ever since the day Sherlock had built his mind palace.   
  
  He had never been inside of the room before, but he knew what was inside, and what it contained, even as his mind refused to acknowledge and to register it. He had thrown away the key, forgotten it for convenience's sake and his own, even though it was a futile attempt. The mind palace needed no keys to be unlocked. There were no secrets, no privacy, but it remained locked, anyway.   
  
  It was always the same. Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. A nice blue wallpaper with clouds on the walls, and a nicely carpeted floor. The carpet was a soft cream, never fading with time and age. A door, just one, made of heavy steel, and with a sturdy lock set into it, to keep things out, or to keep things in. That was rather changeable to Sherlock's mind, but he no longer cared. No one lived in there, or maybe there was someone, Sherlock never cared to check. It didn't matter, so long as they stayed inside and did not come out to mess up his order, he was content.   
  
  It would be quiet in it - of course it would, it was rather solidly sound proofed, ever since it was built. The carpet would be soft, bare feet whispering across its surface, absorbing all weight and sound. Toys would be scattered across the floor, little building bricks, derailed toy trains, little glass marbles, still and glinting in the artificial light, their bright colors sharp  against the mellow scheme of the room in a false plastic cheer. There was a shelf, a wooden one, right up against the wall. Too tall, always too tall for him to reach. But no, he was grown up now,  _he_  could reach the top shelf, but in the room, the shelf was always taller than him. There were books, picture books, books with tiny words crawling across its pages, textbooks that he did not understand and yet at the same time did, leather bound journals full of letters and alphabets that he never wanted to read or to understand, in a foreign hand that he never bothered to remember whose it was. It was irrelevant, either way. There was a rubber duck, right in the corner of the shelf, the one that had a hole in it and always sank in the bathtub way before the bubbles popped. A toy magnifying glass, and a microscope kit that was brand new and never put to use. He didn't see the point of using something substandard with a limited range when there was a better one that he could borrow, despite the annoyed shouts and the scoldings that sometimes followed after.   
  
  There was a paper clip, hidden away beneath a corner of the carpet that could be lifted, near the rocking horse that was well worn and used, often bearing little pirates upon its back to war at sea for bounty and treasures beneath. Crayons littered across scattered sheets of paper, each blank and pristine, not crumpled at the least, though some were folded into paper aeroplanes with bumpy noses from unfortunate meetings with the wall. They never flew far, not really, when there was the constriction of all four walls. He was pretty certain that they would go a long way outside of the room, but they had never left the boundaries of the four walls, not a single one of them. That was fine, since it kept their wings dry and crisp. There was a little mobile, hanging suspending from the ceiling, a mini solar system. Pluto was there, too, along with the other planets and the Sun, the largest star. Not real, though, he knew. Not really accurate. They never moved, never swung like it was supposed to, just like the time in the room. But that was okay, too. It was pretty to look at when he lay down on his back, with the planets above him, far far up on the ceiling, unreachable and small and  _vast_  for his mind to wrap around. One day he would see it, the planets and their systems and their routes all revolving around each other and a center, and it would be as beautiful and pretty and wonderful as he had made it out to be. Maybe on a rocket, if technology got any better. He was sure it would. It did.   
  
  The wallpaper wasn't his choice, but it was better than the blank white walls from before. Well, he had really fixed it on his own, but then the wallpaper came along, and he left it alone since it fitted with paper aeroplanes and imaginary boats and seas. Beneath, he knew, was the harsh and rough texture of concrete and white paint, although it was really a multitude of colors now, covered all over with numbers and alphabets. There would be pictures, crudely drawn. Maps, of real locations and countries, and fictitious places and islands. Everything overlapped, and some were illegible, but he knew what each mark was, each stroke and smudge of ink and graphite. There was a place where he had scrawled his own name over and over again.  _Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock. Holmes. This room belongs to Sherlock Holmes._  And that was true, though it was nice to have his name written onto it as a clear mark of possession. Sort of like the way people put their names onto their textbooks, and at the top of medical files in alphabetical order. He had scrawled it onto a cloud on the wallpaper, as well, just in case people forgot him and his room. The boy with the room, the boy with the sky. It sounded nice to his ears in the silence.   
  
  Outside, there was a world. A mind palace. Corridors, people, colors. The who, what, when, where, why and how. Outside, there were rules, and real aeroplanes not made of paper. Outside, there were clocks, and with clocks there was time, and dates, and days with different alphabets at the beginning. Outside where information littered the floor and the walls, every little inch, more than he would and wanted to know. Evolving things, changing things. New things. And while he was eager to explore and learn, he was also content to stay within the room and the unchanging elements in the silence. The room was stable, and solid, as it had been for the many years previous and the many years after.   
  
  Wars could have raged on around it, battles fought and won or lost. The world could have crumbled around it, and it would remain as it was, the nice room with the wallpaper with its toys, ever loyal and true. It kept its occupant safe, would keep him safe, if he would stay behind it, black curly hair and blue eyes and all. It was never night, and it was never dark. Never lonely, either. Not really, unless the light got too bright, too glaring, and too white, which it sometimes did. Not often, thankfully. Sherlock's room, and no one else's, it declared quietly with the name on its walls.    
  
  Things did change, eventually. Pluto wasn't in the solar system anymore, and some time later, even the solar system itself was out of the Palace altogether. New faces, old faces grown older yet. New files on top of old files no longer in use. The vase of marigolds became a vase of lilies nowadays. The microscope he often borrowed turned old, and dusty, until one day he found it with a crack in one of its magnifying lenses and then it disappeared, as well.   
  
  An old address became a new address, and then settled into 221B Baker Street. Cocaine and cigarettes became cases and nicotine patches. A room became a house became a flat and then a palace. Evenings out in the foggy London streets became evenings at home with a comforting cup of tea and ugly jumpers and machines that sometimes did not work. A friend grew flesh and blood and sprouted sandy hair and a bad arm - not perfect, but still.    
  
  The room watched, deep within the recesses of the mind palace. Quiet, unassuming, still and old as time. Everything was the same. Everything was not the same.   
  
  The boy with the curly hair and the blue eyes continued to fly his paper aeroplanes, unseen and unheard by anyone who was not and never will be aware.   
  
  Recently, there was the new addition of a rather stripey jumper. Rather unsightly, and with its own place draped over a little sailboat that had never been on water. The room didn't mind. It held forgotten things, long lost things, and kept them to itself. In a way, it was being selfish. In a way, it was doing its job. Sherlock remembered them. Sherlock forgot them. It did not matter. Should not matter.   
  
  The door remains locked till this day.   
  
  But sometimes, just sometimes, there would be a paper aeroplane neatly folded, lying forlornly outside the door on its side, with the name of a little boy with wild black hair and pretty blue eyes on its wing, in biro.   
  
  Sometimes.

**Author's Note:**

> Just to explain some things, this fic crosses between reality and memory as well as Sherlock's mind palace. I've dropped hints about, or maybe they're not really hints. The interpretation is entirely up to you. I would be glad if you would share your interpretation about this with me, too.
> 
> Mine isn't a happy one.


End file.
